Could September Finally Be Over Soon?

Once upon a time, the web was a frontier of exciting possibilities and intelligent conversation. Then America Online (AOL!) started up.

The influx of American kids logging in from Windows 3.1 machines completely swamped online culture, and it hasn't recovered since. And long past the time when you thought AOL should have died, it keeps going, like a possessed Energizer Bunny.

Those of you who count on American customers for your web business, you know you have to allow for AOL users in your digital strategy. They still make up a tiny percentage of the web traffic!

Now Time-Warner is going to spin off AOL after having absorbed it 8 years ago. Amongst other ballast they're dumping, they're selling off... wait for it!... ICQ.

It takes a special kind of chutzpah to put a $300 million price tag on ICQ, in these days of Twitter hype. Yeah, sure, ICQ will come back any day now! But for a company that got its start as a game subscription service running on the Atari 2600, and has since survived not only the video game crash but the dot-com crash too, chutzpah is its middle name.

Peter Brittain

Blogging: Seven Dead Blog Tropes

Of course, every website owner with even a passing interest in search engine optimization has had the word "blog" pounded into them until they can't take it anymore and started a blog. Now, when blogs were first starting up yonder 'bout a decade ago, these tropes were excusable. but now, many of the things that people were doing with them are now tired cliches. Check your blog to see if it's suffering from any of those symptoms - if so, it might be time for a scraping!

1. Replying to every comment.
You are right that sometimes you want to engage your public. Appending more of your bright, witty banter to the tail of a good, solid gem of linkbait is the sensible thing, especially while you're soaking up all this adoration. But when you're responding to every single comment, even if it's only as brief as "hey thanks!", you're saying two things: (1) You have nothing to do. You're not that busy. Your whole life is this blog. (2) Your ego is so starved that you're gobbling up every crumb of attention as if it were the last human interaction you'd ever get.

2. Echo! Echo! Echo!
Too many blogs do this. They take the top story of the day and repeat it, with a link and a couple lines of commentary. Remember the "Balloon Boy?" No? Good, this means you have a life. But the day that the Balloon Boy dominated every screen of every TV news channel for 36 hours before everybody got sick and tired of it is commemorated forever in your blog, post #147, a one-paragraph link that contributes nothing and nobody reads. Or searches for it.

3. I'm sorry for not blogging.
Wow, it's been so long since you updated that when your site popped up in our RSS aggregators, we had to puzzle a moment to remember who you were. Oh, yeah, that site! Oh, so you just brought us back to tell us how sorry you are for not having anything to say. Well, rest assured that your link is now deleted from our browser so you don't have to worry about letting us down again.

4. The tag stew.
They're called 'tag clouds', and for a while they looked like they'd be the fad that never went away. But over time, tag clouds have shown their failing: they tend to have two, maybe three really big tags standing out like a brass gong in church, and the rest are all the same-size tiny text links. What's the chef specialty of the day? SEO BLOGGING on a bed of rice.

5. The Blogroll That Links To The Entire Internet.
We know, you love your friends. And your sidebar gives a shout-out to your homies. And you make mates really, really easily. In fact, you're such a link slut that you don't even read most of these yourself any more. If you go clicking through your blogroll and find more than five dead sites, just consider scrapping the whole thing.

6. The image that makes no sense.
Somewhere, somehow, a certain demographic of bloggers came along at exactly the right time in history to get it ingrained into their head that they must have an image in every blog post. It's in Leviticus somewhere. Even if they make no sense. That text looks so lonely by itself, let's add this cute rubber duckie to spice up our rant about subway fare hires. Oh, stock images! Accompany a post about SEO scoring algorithms with this wildly smiling woman skipping through a field, apparently wafted to blissful nirvana by it all. And what does this set of stairs have to do with your website management post? You could at least toss in a stair metaphor.

7. The calendar gizmo.
Can we be frank? Calendar gizmos all look ugly and blocky. In addition, nobody uses them. Seriously, put a Javascript redirect in there to log a hit every time somebody clicks the calendar gizmo. You'll get the occasional hit from a confused indexing spider, and that's it.

Peter Brittain

An SEO Expert's Garden Of Lost Search Engines

Who cares about any other search engine but Google? Oh, OK, maybe Yahoo or Bing. But seriously, every single time you read a website marketing blog, it's Google, Google, Google. It's as if it were the only search engine in the world, as far as search engine optimization is concerned.

But what could we learn from optimizing for other search engines? And furthermore, what would the SEO world look like right now if we had one of these companies as the king of search instead of Big-Daddy-G?

Cuil
You'd expect better from former Google employees, wouldn't you? From its baffling name to its almost-random results to its various sundry failings, Cuil has so far been the Hindenburg of search engine disasters. The reviews have gone beyond mere "bad" to inspiring words like "tragic," "wretched," and "bile inducing." It's still kicking, but over a year after launch you can still type in the most leading possible query and get back results from the Twilight Zone.

Inktomi
This one could have gone somewhere. Started by a UC Berkeley alumnus and professor and having had actual success for a couple of years on its college-campus testing ground, Inktomi just could have been a contender. It was robustly acquiring other companies and even partnering with AOL at one point with their Traffic Server product. But lo, came the dot-com-bust, and Inktomi ended its days as a Yahoo! acquisition.

Go.com
Probably the greatest search engine name of all time, the URL is still registered with Disney and still acting as a portal. But after Disney announced in 2000 that Go.com would be closing down and laying off approximately 400 employees and even retiring the stock, it was clear that it was not meant to be. Today if you type a search query into Go.com, you're actually using Yahoo!'s rented technology. Go's search engine was another victim of the dot-com-bust, coupled with the fact that they were trying to be more of a portal whereas the rest of the world wanted a pure search.

Lycos
Technically still kicking, but everybody can smell the charcoal stacking on its pyre. Lycos was once the hottest search destination on the web. In 1999, it was the most visited online destination in the world! They had a great TV campaign with a friendly trained dog who raced off to fetch your results, usually directed at shopping online. But Google handed them their head. Today Lycos is bought and sold and swapped around like a pile of poker chips. They've dropped much of their former subsidiaries. Let us not forget that Lycos was once responsible for Angelfire.com and Tripod.com, making them the Earnest and Julio Gallo of the search world (to use a bum-wines metaphor).

Teoma
Another idea that seemed like it could have gone somewhere in an alternate universe. Teoma was launched in 2000 by a team at Rutgers University, New Jersey. It had one secret-sauce ingredient that gave it a chance alongside Google: a ranking algorithm. Originally called "Subject-Specific Popularity," this algorithm measured not only a page's topic, but the topic of the pages linking to it as well, to give it increased relevance in that topic. Teoma just basically ran out of steam and got bought out; its algorithm today survives as Ask.com's ExpertRank algorithm.

Peter Brittain

Getting to Know a Niche Market

One of the prime goals for an Internet marketer who wants to market within a specific niche is to get to know that niche.

A specific market demographic is likely to have a whole culture around it, and you run into trouble if you get the culture wrong when composing your marketing materials. Leather, metal, motorcycles, and lager will go over big with marketing to bikers, but will flop with selling needlepoint kits to grannies.

One of the most important demographics is the youth market. Billion-dollar advertising companies exhaust years of research into study groups of kids and young people aged 14 to 21, to find out what they listen to, what they eat, where they go, and what their current slang is.

By all means, it's necessary to become a part of this culture if you intend to market to it. Your best bet is to join Twitter groups, social bookmarking sites, and mailing lists devoted to your target culture and then remain very quiet about it. Spend more time listening than you do talking. Every time you see an unfamiliar term, look it up in Wikipedia or some other source to get the origin of the phrase.

For example: You've seen a meme going around with Photoshopped images with the caption "Madness? This is SPARTA!" It's useful to know that this line comes from the movie 300 based on the graphic novel of the same name, written and illustrated by Frank Miller. So if you're composing an ad aimed at young comic book fans, you might advertise your web start-up with "This is a START-UP!" accompanied by a Greek warrior. I know, that's a lame slogan, but it illustrates the point.

One site which does this right is Reddit.com. Their staff is outrageously meme-hip, and when they market, they know their audience like nobody else. The ad in the corner urging you to create your own sub-Reddit category randomly includes lines like: "...do it for the children" (a popular satire of social causes), "...for your WoW guild" (World of Warcraft is a very popular game there), "...sudo create your own reddit" (referencing both Linux and the XKCD comic, both with a huge following on Reddit), and "...for a fringe political candidate" (The US presidential election brought these out in droves).

When you use a culture's own in-jokes and memes to communicate with it, you're sending them a little wink: "We understand you! We know what's important to you!" And then you build up a level of trust with the potential customer.


Peter Brittain
Slinky is an SEO Company based in Perth, Western Australia

Analyzing the Latest Most Profitable Google AdSense Words

Handy little list for all users of Google AdSense, this is a list of some AdSense keywords, and this is the list of the highest-paying AdSense keywords.

Talk about any of these subjects on a blog with a Google ad in the sidebar, get the listed dollar amount every time somebody clicks the ad.

Well, as the site explains elsewhere, it's not that simple! You have to have original content, be a site in good standing, etc. You can't just post the list and expect it to do anything.

We ran some data-crunching on the list just to see what the top-ten most expensive words are by frequency:

118 mesothelioma
71 attorney
62 removal
62 hair
52 lawyer
44 laser
43 insurance
43 google
42 life
42 hosting

Clearly, our new word for the day is "mesothelioma", a cancer commonly caused by asbestos. Construction workers and others exposed to asbestos the world over are suing the pants off their former employers, and lawyers apparently consider it money in the bank. This is no laughing matter; asbestos is nasty stuff and mesothelioma's primary symptom is shortness of breath.

Laser hair removal surgery is also a big business. With more countries of the world becoming more liberal and posing in a swimsuit for their photo on MySpace, it stands to reason.

Google itself has a cottage industry around it, with experts all over the web who can't wait to tell you all about Google's products and services and how they can improve your life.

That leaves 'hosting' in the top ten, followed by 'web', #11 at 38 hits. Even though web hosting itself is pretty cheap these days, it's a high-profit business because of the huge volume. Other honorable mention goes to home mortgage refinancing and loans.

There it all is! Now, how to make all of that become stimulating, relevant, and useful content?

Peter Brittain

Five Recipes For Linkbait

Linkbait is the social web's term for the kind of content that regularly gets linked from social bookmarking and news-sharing sites. Think Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Metafilter, Yahoo Buzz, and even just plain blogs. The best link-bait is something that appeals to the lazy nature in all of us. After watching the social web for a few years now, here are the kinds of things you might post to your blog to more frequently get visitors from social sites:

Video - Number one with a bullet. Video content is extremely popular, especially if it's under five minutes. Consider it for your next tutorial of handy tips.

Images - Especially a funny one. Even a vaguely amusing one. Heck, any picture at all. I've followed links to a picture of somebody's shoes - regular ordinary shoes. But I had to click, because I just couldn't believe that somebody would just post a picture of their shoes!

Anything funny - Humor goes over big with the web audience, and then they have to share it with everyone they know. Have you gotten the requisite 25 forwarded jokes from your co-workers in your inbox today?

"Breaking" news - You really have to have the scoop on this one. Anything that happens in your local area, and hence gets to you first through local media, and which you think might have world impact, could go here. But this is all luck.

Numbered lists - It got you here, didn't it? Numbered lists work for the same reason that images and videos do - they're easy to scan.

More on link baiting


Peter Brittain

ALT Image Tags in Web Marketing

The "alt" tag as alternative text for an image placed on a web page, has a curiously evolved history.

It started out being the fix for web browsers that couldn't display images - yes, they weren't a given for the early web browsers. Just when we thought we could get rid of alt-text, the blind and visually-impaired community spoke up, "Whoa! We need those to read what the picture's about!" and so now using alt-tags became a matter of accessibility.

And now search engines use them to index images. So alt-text is here to stay. To use it, you would put:

< img src="http://mysite/image.jpg" alt="our company logo" / >

And you can go one further and use a title tag, which makes text pop up when the user mouses over it. To see a title tag in action, visit XKCD and hover your mouse over a comic strip. Sometimes it adds to the joke, sometimes it explains it, and sometimes it's a secret message!

So what do you do with it? Boost your SEO! To see how that works, try searching Google images for any not-too-obvious word. Let's try antiseptic. We get to about the eighth result after seven bottles of mouthwash and such, and then... a wallpaper image of a blob-person on a blue background. It really doesn't have anything to do with what we were thinking of, does it? How did that happen? That's the name of the wallpaper file, and it's included in the alt-text.

That's how powerful alt text can be! Just be careful to use this for good and not evil - this is also how pornography gets mixed in with search results for innocent keywords.

Peter Brittain

Need a Perth Website Hosting Company?

What if We Had a Global Economic Meltdown and the World Didn't End Anyway?

Our reigning web entrepreneur guru, Paul Graham, is questioning how this recession will affect start-up markets. We've seen a ton of hand-wringing going on over the state of the world market lately.

Here's the thing that I'll say which is different from what everybody else says: We're going to survive.

Yes, believe it or not, we'll make it! We've seen this before during the Web Bubble. Lots of web companies died off in a hurry, but did you ever notice that these were companies which weren't based on a very good idea to begin with? The hardy companies that knew how to really make money kept going; they even got richer during the worst of the Web Bubble!

Similarly, this recession is hitting some people hard - but it's mainly hitting the people who were being foolish with their money to start with. Yes, I said it! The millionaires have lost their shirts in the stock market, and the people who treat houses like horses at a race-track, buying them just to flip them, are now out of their investment. But the working Joe and Jane are just going on the same way they always did.

If your income is derived from an online source, you have an advantage that few possess. Your income is not tied to any one country's economy! You can work with companies and individuals all over the world. Even if the economy in the United States is tanking, you can find a booming market in Canada, and there's a customer or client. So it is also true for business between Australia and Great Britain. Or between India and Romania.

There's a lot of panic going on, and that's causing some job loss. That's a shame, because it really is more panic than it is anything else.


Peter Brittain

Lessons Learned From Twitter Hacking

It's the kind of story that really gets your attention: Twitter, by any measure the most buzzed about network of 2008, got hacked by an 18-year-old!

With absolutely no skill or finesse involved, either. Anybody reading this could have done the same. You just download a free password-cracker program like Crack, John the Ripper, L0phtCrack, or Cain, point it at a log-in page, and leave it run for a couple of days. It's that simple.

Dictionary attacks have been used since at least the 1980s, before the World Wide Web even came along. System admins have been scolding users for keeping easily guessed passwords around for almost that long. So the fact that you can be on the staff of a hip, trendy 'Web 2.OH' company and not know better just goes to show that this problem is never going away.

Jeff gives an interesting solution on the article: making an incrementally increased delay between each log-in attempt. Not too punishing for the legitimate user, but too much of a hurdle for a cracker. Even better are the forms you see here and there on the web, which check your password for a security level when you sign up.

Finally, if OpenID catches on, we just might be able to get all of the problems with user passwords in one spot, where at least they'll be easier to kill.

Hits and Misses on Predictions for the Social Web in 2009

Over at Search Engine Watch, I just saw the 7 Social Media Predictions for 2009.

Now, you know we're all just bloggers here, and my swami turban is just as pretty as SEW's, so I figured I'd see if I can refine the list by picking which predictions will hit and which will miss.

1. Social Media Continues its Rapid Growth - Hit! Hey, like this is hard to predict?

2. Business Networks Surge as Economic Crisis Continues - Miss. I've been on the web since it started, and I haven't seen walled gardens disappear yet. Companies like Yahoo and Apple tighten their grip, if anything. And do you think MSN Spaces will just help you pack when you move to Google's Blogger?

3. Many Free Services Will Become Defunct - Miss! The thing is, web server space and tools are so cheap, you basically can run them out of your closet. And Open Source software has been with us since the 1970s. People can afford to keep doing it for a hobby. I can see more aggressive marketing, though.

4. More Traditional Broadcast Television Moves Online - Hit! We keep seeing a lot of this already. Just in the past couple of years, I've been surprised when I discover TV episodes, full films, and even sports and entertainment specials being webcasted. Growing trend. My TV is gathering more dust every day.

5. Social Media Changes Off-line Behaviour - Meh. Maybe, but we've seen some of this (employers Googling for applicant's blogs) and some not (anonymity is still pretty easy).

6. More Social Media Searches for Products and Services - Miss. Social searching is overrated. Look at StumbleUpon: It was a gold mine when it first started, now it's a spammer network. When any social web system gets too big, it loses its social appeal and becomes one more noisy place where you don't know anybody.

7. Marketing Budgets will Continue Shrinking - Hit. This wasn't too hard a prediction to make, either.


Peter Brittain